A new report by the Insurance Council of Australia has been released, highlighting the progress the insurance industry has made since Australia's most costly extreme weather event.
In February 2023, the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) engaged Deloitte to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the responses from insurers and the ICA regarding the 2022 floods in South-East Queensland and Northern Rivers, collectively referred to as CAT221.
The follow-up report was released today, After the floods – meeting the benchmark, assesses industry progress in adopting and implementing those recommendations.
Findings from the follow-up report include:
- The industry has achieved notable advancements, with considerable investments and resources dedicated to enhancing insurer operations in line with all recommendations, supported by active work plans.
- Progress among insurers varies, with some advancing further than others. While insurers have been focused on implementation, the degree of progress has differed significantly. Although some uplift initiatives have already been completed, more transformative changes, such as technology upgrades, will require varying amounts of time for different insurers to achieve.
- Despite the progress made, insurers still have additional work ahead. This varies among insurers and includes enhancing maturity in stress testing and simulation activities, managing consumer vulnerability on a larger scale, improving the maturity of quality assurance functions for claims decisions, refining approaches to resource complaint handling functions, utilizing data triaging to automate or expedite certain claims post-events, and ensuring comprehensive, high-quality, and consistent data for internal reporting and management oversight.
The ICA released the first tranche of the industry’s response to these inquiry reports in December 2024, accepting 78 of 187 recommendations across both reports.
The ICA is now working on the next tranche of recommendations and looks forward to continuing our engagement with consumer advocates and other key stakeholders on this work.